A Summary Recap of WordCamp San Francisco 2011

What an amazing experience the last few days have been. We laughed, we cried, we even had a few spirited debates, and my head is spinning from three days of non-stop WordPress learning and networking.

Digression: Blog Series

I’m on a plane right now heading back home and before I started to write, I wanted to create a new feature on my site called “series”. Because I am on a Chromebook, and don’t have access to all of my usual tools, I did a little bit of cowgirl coding (more on that later) and created a new taxonomy for this. Then I added a linked list of terms to the sidebar. Later, I’ll add a table of contents feature to the post sidebar on the right so that you can easily see the other posts from this series in the order they were written in. And yes, I will turn this into a plugin, so be on the lookout for that.

On the topic of WordCamp

I plan on writing several posts about all of the things I learned at WordCamp, instead of cramming them into just one post. For now, suffice it to say that this has been one of the best experiences on my professional life.

Day One

I attended more sessions this day than any other day. The main focus was on large scale deployments of WordPress. The two that I enjoyed the most were the BuddyPress 1.5 feature updates overview we got from lead developer John Jacoby, and a case study of WordPress being used on an enterprise level at eMusic.com.

Day Two

Designers and Developers were all over the place on the second day. It was the day that I met the most people and I hung out in the halls a lot. I enjoyed catching up with Jonathan Davis, lead developer of the Shopp plugin over lunch and I absolutely can’t wait for the next coming version of my favorite eCommerce solution.

It was also great to hear Birmingham’s own Sara Cannon present on responsive web design. She even teased us by telling us that the WordPress admin will be moving towards responsive design as well!

Day Three

The final day of WordCamp was all for content creators and a few miscellaneous topics as well. The highlight of the day was Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word address. He has such a great stage presence and his slides were beautiful reworks of Jazz album covers. I also enjoyed learning more about organizing WordCamps and Meetups from Aaron Hockley.

Wrap Up

I loved the three day format this year and am absolutely thrilled that I was able to attend. I have to give some love again to my generous sponsors: